Posted
by
Soulskillon Thursday April 30, 2009 @01:16AM
from the wait-for-the-vespene-farmers dept.

Kheldon tips an interview with Petroglyph's Chuck Kroegel about an upcoming MMO called Mytheon, which will be free to play, but also involve micro-transactions. It's an action strategy game with RTS and RPG elements. He says, "The game starts in the Greco-Roman era, as well as Egypt, and as time goes on we'll expand throughout the whole world. Something everyone has in common is they all have their mythologies, these beasts and these stories that have come to us through legends and folklore. All the nations of the world, they all have their own. So in our game Mytheon, we can eventually fill the Earth in terms of being able to explore mythologies of all nations. It's an action/strategy game, with elements of RPG, and elements of RTS that people have to come to appreciate and enjoy."
Update — 4/30 at 17:30 by SS: The summary originally linked to an article stating that Petroglyph was working with Trion World Network on Mytheon. This is not the case; they are working together on a different game, which is the MMORTS previously referenced in the title.

I think this has some promise, but it would need to have an immense number of scenarios to play through. When I was playing StarCraft (and I assure you, I played like a crack addict) the main thing that kept me playing was the wide variety and type of scenarios.
Who remembers the generic 9x9 defense maps of every flavor (lurker, sunken defense, etc.)? The RPG maps, where you could have characters that leveled and learned skills? The really awful paint version where you drew on the minimap with pylons to make art?
Sure, the main attraction was the standard 3v3 BGH, but it was fun to mess around with the other stuff.

This sounds like an awesome game, but visuals make a huge difference in games. I don't care if it's shiny. If it looks like age of mythology, I'll be more than happy. The problem is that I know this will be 3D, so I don't want it to look like WC3. Sometimes, the drawn-out stuff just looks much better. I know that the meteor spell in AoM is MUCH better than the one in Black and White 2. And I'm quite sure more work went into the latter. The other aspect that I want is 3 races. Just 2 races isn't enough, as i

I think this is the first attempt at a 'high end' MMORTS. Its certainly not the first mmorts. I think mankind gets to claim that distinction. I was one of the key developers of Shattered Galaxy, which I'd consider a low-end mmorts. Whether its successful or not is up for debate. I'd say yes, from a design perspective. MMORTS offered a lot of unique design problems that had to be overcome. SG was by far the most fun project that I've worked on. I'm interested to see what this MMORTS plays like.

It was definitely one of the most addictive games I have ever played. You really needed to work with your teammates to win a territory by bringing the right type of units in the field and supporting each others. The unit customization was also really good, you could go as far as removing all weapons from a tank to place even more armor so you could POC under heavy fire. All the supports type were awesome too: radar jammer, cloaks, infiltrator (you take the color of your enemy), scans, mines, etc.

The worlds FIRST MMORTS of high end gameplay is "galaxy online"
They claim this title without even doing the research into other games, are they stupid? or just trying to make ass's out of themselves?
(however Galaxy online is more of a MMOJRTS, u'll see what i mean when u go look it up)

meh both travian and astro empires are just as much an "MMORTS" as galaxy online, and both started before Galaxy Online did. tho travian resets its servers, astro empires first server is nearing it's 3-year mark.

Dreamlords is a weird but interesting concept. overall it just failed to hook me. I did travian once on a speed server and it was fun but couldn't keep up after a few weeks, I like civony a lot more, it's very similar but much better overall imo.

i really enjoy GO's whole fully-customizable ships thing, it makes it a lot of fun, unfortunately i'm in the FAIL faction known as Raymen on the 01-Aries server...

astro empires, i dunno, i really like it till about level 60 then i stop caring and just mass up levis

Y'know, that's actually the first thing I picked up on when I read the summary. That quote is so enormously vague as to be meaningless. You're probably right that he said "high-end" meaning high budget, because, quite frankly, if you're interpreting "high-end" any other way, the claim becomes entirely laughable, instead of merely questionable. But at what point does your budget qualify you to be considered "high-end"? It's a totally meaningless quote.

Apparently the guys at Petroglyph haven't been checking out the competition. There's a nice list at www.mmorts.com [mmorts.com] including such cool titles as Beyond Protocol, Dreamlords, and Battleforge.

Hi,
The news article got it wrong. Trion and Petroglyph are NOT working together on Mytheon. They are working together on a different MMORTS. True Games and Petroglyph are working on Mytheon.
I did not mention Trion in my news tip submission.

Drew Banyai - Programmer at Petrooglyph
We are working on an MMORTS with Trion, and an MMORPG with True Games. Anything else is just confusion in the news...
The third game we're working on is an XBLA game and has not really been talked about... but I assure you, we're not over-reaching.

You fixed the error about Trion working with us, which is good. Trion is working with us on an MMORTS, and that has been announced officially.
You failed to fix the fact that Mytheon is an MMORPG, not an MMORTS...